These things positively scream "rip me! rip me!"- and if they came with that right, I'd probably buy them just to save me the trouble of downloading them. Until then, sorry guys, combining the shoddy packaging of a pirated copy with the transience of a rental is pretty much a prescription for failure.
Well, the conversation has now devolved into a debate on whether the Microsoft tax even exists *rolls eyes*, so, yeah... he's not the brightest crayon in the box.
They derive additional profit as a result of the performance and cost benefits of using Apache. That is business advantage. Not much more than semantics to your argument.
Indeed I do. Do you suppose that Yahoo et al chose such a critical component randomly, or because it did not provide them with superior performance relative to the competition? Of course not- they saw that it offered them a business advantage. That's leveraging a technology.
Seconded.
Any activity that leverages software for business advantage is likely to restrict the software's freedom I want to hear him explain this one to Google, Amazon, and Ebay- all of whom use Apache.
No link, but he said it at CES 2007 at the roundtable.
As I said, I don't know what a Vista OEM costs them, as he was speaking specifically to XP at that point.
In any event, the fact remains that Linux or no-OS boxes are consistently priced under equivalent Windows boxes from the same vendor. Thats a hard fact to tapdance around. Unless you have somebody reliable actually saying that the cost of windows is subsidized, or actual numbers to back your point, I'm just not seeing how you're coming to your conclusions.
Forgot to ask, if you think there is no Windows tax, why do you think it is that Linux machines (eg, from Dell) are typically costed roughly $50 less than the comparable Windows machine? Or why the Eee PC Windows version comes with a smaller SSD than the Linux version?
I can appreciate what you're trying to say, and that this is an issue near and dear to your heart, but it goes against what the guys who actually run the industry are saying. If you have evidence to prove your point, present it.
Because the original point related to business decisionmaking.
As for the idea of offsetting costs, Michael Dell indicated at CES that $60 would cover the costs of not bundling trialware, while Sony has made the same offer at $50. A Windows OEM install costs Dell about $100, again according to Michael Dell. I'm not sure what a Vista OEM costs them, but one way or another, they're not getting 100% back.
Previously in this thread. The point about crippleware/trialware was brought up first, and the cost of volume licensing vs OEM pricing was brought up later. I'll save you the time of looking it up, though: trialware doesn't get put on enterprise PC purchases and volume licensing still costs money.
First off, let me say that I'm not sure what the personal jab you mention is; I assure you my intent is not to offend.
The question about people getting what their taxes go for is one that I've heard a lot, and I understand both sides of the issue, having argued much the same thing on different issues at different times in my life. It seems to me, though, that when we pay our taxes, we do it on the presumption that they go for the betterment of the community, rather than just ourselves. We do not make every road a toll road because some people don't drive, or make people who file charges pay the prosecutor's salary. You might reasonably argue that since you didn't need those services, that you shouldn't have to pay for them, or less reasonably protest that you should have the option of spending that money on a private road system or alternative system of justice. But we don't allow that because we recognize that the system doesn't function if it doesn't know where its next paycheck comes from, and that even if you don't use those facilities, they still benefit you indirectly. It seems to me that the school system falls into that category.
The question of less money for the public schools is a big one, because nobody really agrees on how much less money there will be, and where or when that will have an impact is essentially unknowable. What we do know is that requiring more finely grained accounting of per-student funds changes the allocation schedule, which gives the school less time to spend the same amount of money. That increases the opportunity cost per student, reduces the school's ability to capitalize on their liquid assets and trims another degree of flexibility from an already rigid purchasing system. Even if the total amount of money the school has on hand in a given calendar year remains the same, the method of allocation changes the game in a big way.
About the children/parents who need/want an alternative education- I understand. Bob Jones University is right up the street from me as I type this, and some of my close friends and neighbors from years past have attended it on the principle that no cost was too great to spare their child from the Godless classroom. Some of them were not wealthy people, and labored mightily to make ends meet, and for those people, school vouchers would represent kindness in a great degree.
However, much as my sympathy lies with those people whose convictions drove them to seek what they felt was a more appropriate education for their children, I feel a greater share of compassion for the child whose parents don't give a damn where or if they attend school. The kid who takes the bus every day to a broken down inner city school in the hope of finding truth in the promise of our country- that with hard work, a little luck, and the perseverance common to all successful men, anyone can carve for themselves a better life than the one they were born into. And sadly, this is the child that gets hurt by these plans. That's the million or ten million children whose futures we shortchange in headlong homage to the questionable virtue of an education in diversity.
The question about the relative position of the poor is a reasonable one, but one which does not take into account 1) the issue of opportunity cost, 2) the fact that children are extremely nonliquid commodities (much though toddlers sometimes seem to be an exception), or 3) the limits of institutional flexibility, especially with regard to absorbative capacity. It really isn't possible for a child to be shunted between schools as one star rises and another falls, and certainly isn't desirable for either public or private schools, since the major expenditures of both of those organizations do not scale linearly with the number of students. Between these factors and the smaller cash pool, public schools will be forced to do more with less, while simultaneously being hamstrung by the new accounting requirements.
I'd like to reiterate that I know where you're coming from on this.
I have no idea why that was informative to so many people either, actually, since you're right- it's just my opinion and supporting evidence.
My opposition to the private-schools-for-all proposals is based on the experience of going to a rapidly growing parochial school, and seeing how the much-vaunted small teacher-student and peer-peer relationships suffered under that growth.
It is always dangerous to expand personal experience into broader trends. My experience taught me that while the private schools are well-equipped to handle small numbers of students with significant access to outside resources, they are not ready to become public schools themselves- that their success is not independent of their scale, and that the success of students in a given environment has as much to do with the students themselves as with the building in which they are taught. Your mileage may vary.
To my mind, it seems reasonable that one of three scenarios will transpire if/when school vouchers become the norm.
Firstly, that the vouchers cause a mass exodus from underperforming schools to private schools, exceeding the absorbative capacity of those institutions, while simultaneously destroying the intimacy of the student community and forcing the schools to either lower the rigorous academic standards that brought them to such a perilous position, or fail the new crop of students ill-prepared for such a transition.
The second scenario is that vouchers create a flood of new applicants to private schools, but that the private schools accept only a small portion of those students, effectively preserving the status quo in the limited number of private institutions, but doing little more than creating a brain drain in the public system, while simultaneously reducing its ability to respond effectively by leveraging capital- remember that government allocations occur on the fiscal calendar, while per-student allocations cannot be released until enrollment is finished.
The third scenario is the true status quo scenario: that vouchers are insufficient to overcome the difficulties posed by the lack of private school busing systems, gifted and challenged programs, needs-based lunch discounts, speech therapy, or counseling. That nothing changes except the introduction of another layer of bureaucratic waste and delay in the allocation of government money. In this scenario, the rich, though already possessing the resources to afford an alternative education, are afforded the luxury of having that decision subsidized, while the poor continue to attend the same underperforming schools that have fostered generation after generation of dropouts.
I don't like the idea that the quality of a child's education, that the scope of their horizons, should depend on the thickness of their daddy's wallet. Some people, apparently including yourself, feel differently; some disagree with my assessment of the workability of the voucher plans, and I can respect that even as I disagree with it.
Which is still just tap dancing around the fact that there *is* a cost, and not an insignificant one given the narrow margins of the commodity PC market.
I live in a raid county. Trust me, if human suffering is a solution to this problem, I don't think putting immigrants on the rack would bring this to a close any more quickly. The idea of punishing the heads of corporations is a step in the right direction, but it still doesn't address the fundamental human rights concerns I have about the system. What seems to me to be a fair system is to go ahead and make all the "illegals" citizens and use existing labor practice laws to ensure that everybody A) competes for the same wages and B) pays the same taxes.
As for the "economic collapse", ask any economist: it just isn't there. Popular perception is that it is, but in real numbers there isn't any evidence, and if you want wages in fruit picking to, pardon the pun, pick up, then enforce the minimum wage laws for everybody so that citizens of this country aren't competing against people who have no legal protection from dollar-a-day wages.
My basic premise here is that we have both a humanitarian and an economic interest in ensuring that Americans have a level field to play upon, and that American businesses have a vested interest in getting the workers, both skilled and unskilled, that they need and that we do not provide. We can meet both these needs, and in so doing boost our competitiveness vis a vis the rest of the world.
You're deliberately confounding cultural and economic prerogatives. We live in the age you mention; every effort we have exerted to stop immigration has failed miserably, and yet we face no such economic collapse.
Private schools have limited capacity. You would be helping the students already at those schools, but not doing any favors for the huddled masses, most of whom won't have anywhere to go even if the cash suddenly becomes available.
Private schools also don't generally have the resources to provide low-cost lunches, gifted and challenged programs, or many of the "extras" that come with a public school education. Busing is a popular complaint- few private schools have the resources to bus students in- as are the lack of speech therapy and student counselors. All of these are more commonly used by low-income students than those from wealthier families, ie, those these proposals are meant to help.
It is my experience that the lawmakers that push these laws know all of this, and use it to prevent the private (and especially parochial) schools from opposing such measures. It's enough to make me question whether their enthusiasm has more to do with feeding the golden goose than it does with starving the beast.
Because everything that works on a small scale works on a large scale, right? And I'll bet all those nice Jesuit schools are going to be really, really happy about taking on the huddled masses. Get real.
I insist that our immigration laws are contrary to the basic concepts of human equality, dignity, and merit because they are the only laws we tolerate that treat people differently based not on who they are, but rather where they come from.
All day long, I hear businesspeople rail against people who work just as hard as they do, who know just as much as they do, and say that the system under which they prosper need not extend to a man akin to them in all respects but the place of their birth. I hear preachers, forgetful of the cardinal rule of their faith- that there, but for the grace of God, go I- announcing with hateful intent that the obligations of mercy, of kindness, of generosity, do not transcend the obligations of law and their mandate of discrimination.
I will not pretend to understand these sentiments. I do not see what there is to fear from letting a man's merit speak louder than his origins, or why a nation as great as ours should suffer that fear to overcome our mercy and our decency. I have a feeling that I'm about to hear why any number of supposedly intelligent people believe we should, though, and that scares me.
I have not seen a single bluescreen on Windows XP that wasn't related to hardware problems. Well, duh- bluescreens only occur when drivers misbehave. Any reasonably competent XP admin would know that, so either you were playing verbal slight of hand, or you didn't know what you were talking about.
Those same bluescreens caused kernel panics on Linux. I call BS. The odds of the same piece of hardware having two different drivers written for different operating systems with the same flaw are remote, to say the least. Name your hardware and driver versions.
Skipping past the parts of your screed that are just your random opinion, your statement about the Windows tax amazes me, and not in a good way. For somebody who claims to understand how businesses make decisions, it is pretty clear that you don't understand that when you add cost at one point in a supply chain, you increase the final cost of the product. It may be "boring", but you're a fool if you don't see its impact.
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These things positively scream "rip me! rip me!"- and if they came with that right, I'd probably buy them just to save me the trouble of downloading them. Until then, sorry guys, combining the shoddy packaging of a pirated copy with the transience of a rental is pretty much a prescription for failure.
Well, the conversation has now devolved into a debate on whether the Microsoft tax even exists *rolls eyes*, so, yeah... he's not the brightest crayon in the box.
They derive additional profit as a result of the performance and cost benefits of using Apache. That is business advantage. Not much more than semantics to your argument.
Indeed I do. Do you suppose that Yahoo et al chose such a critical component randomly, or because it did not provide them with superior performance relative to the competition? Of course not- they saw that it offered them a business advantage. That's leveraging a technology.
Eh, I give your troll a 6/10. You get 8 points for hitting a /. hotbutton, but you lose two for doing it in an ontopic thread.
They don't leverage Apache? They're online businesses using Apache as a web server. That's virtually the *definition* of leveraging.
Any activity that leverages software for business advantage is likely to restrict the software's freedom I want to hear him explain this one to Google, Amazon, and Ebay- all of whom use Apache.
No link, but he said it at CES 2007 at the roundtable.
As I said, I don't know what a Vista OEM costs them, as he was speaking specifically to XP at that point.
In any event, the fact remains that Linux or no-OS boxes are consistently priced under equivalent Windows boxes from the same vendor. Thats a hard fact to tapdance around. Unless you have somebody reliable actually saying that the cost of windows is subsidized, or actual numbers to back your point, I'm just not seeing how you're coming to your conclusions.
Forgot to ask, if you think there is no Windows tax, why do you think it is that Linux machines (eg, from Dell) are typically costed roughly $50 less than the comparable Windows machine? Or why the Eee PC Windows version comes with a smaller SSD than the Linux version?
I can appreciate what you're trying to say, and that this is an issue near and dear to your heart, but it goes against what the guys who actually run the industry are saying. If you have evidence to prove your point, present it.
Because the original point related to business decisionmaking.
As for the idea of offsetting costs, Michael Dell indicated at CES that $60 would cover the costs of not bundling trialware, while Sony has made the same offer at $50. A Windows OEM install costs Dell about $100, again according to Michael Dell. I'm not sure what a Vista OEM costs them, but one way or another, they're not getting 100% back.
Previously in this thread. The point about crippleware/trialware was brought up first, and the cost of volume licensing vs OEM pricing was brought up later. I'll save you the time of looking it up, though: trialware doesn't get put on enterprise PC purchases and volume licensing still costs money.
First off, let me say that I'm not sure what the personal jab you mention is; I assure you my intent is not to offend.
The question about people getting what their taxes go for is one that I've heard a lot, and I understand both sides of the issue, having argued much the same thing on different issues at different times in my life. It seems to me, though, that when we pay our taxes, we do it on the presumption that they go for the betterment of the community, rather than just ourselves. We do not make every road a toll road because some people don't drive, or make people who file charges pay the prosecutor's salary. You might reasonably argue that since you didn't need those services, that you shouldn't have to pay for them, or less reasonably protest that you should have the option of spending that money on a private road system or alternative system of justice. But we don't allow that because we recognize that the system doesn't function if it doesn't know where its next paycheck comes from, and that even if you don't use those facilities, they still benefit you indirectly. It seems to me that the school system falls into that category.
The question of less money for the public schools is a big one, because nobody really agrees on how much less money there will be, and where or when that will have an impact is essentially unknowable. What we do know is that requiring more finely grained accounting of per-student funds changes the allocation schedule, which gives the school less time to spend the same amount of money. That increases the opportunity cost per student, reduces the school's ability to capitalize on their liquid assets and trims another degree of flexibility from an already rigid purchasing system. Even if the total amount of money the school has on hand in a given calendar year remains the same, the method of allocation changes the game in a big way.
About the children/parents who need/want an alternative education- I understand. Bob Jones University is right up the street from me as I type this, and some of my close friends and neighbors from years past have attended it on the principle that no cost was too great to spare their child from the Godless classroom. Some of them were not wealthy people, and labored mightily to make ends meet, and for those people, school vouchers would represent kindness in a great degree.
However, much as my sympathy lies with those people whose convictions drove them to seek what they felt was a more appropriate education for their children, I feel a greater share of compassion for the child whose parents don't give a damn where or if they attend school. The kid who takes the bus every day to a broken down inner city school in the hope of finding truth in the promise of our country- that with hard work, a little luck, and the perseverance common to all successful men, anyone can carve for themselves a better life than the one they were born into. And sadly, this is the child that gets hurt by these plans. That's the million or ten million children whose futures we shortchange in headlong homage to the questionable virtue of an education in diversity.
The question about the relative position of the poor is a reasonable one, but one which does not take into account 1) the issue of opportunity cost, 2) the fact that children are extremely nonliquid commodities (much though toddlers sometimes seem to be an exception), or 3) the limits of institutional flexibility, especially with regard to absorbative capacity. It really isn't possible for a child to be shunted between schools as one star rises and another falls, and certainly isn't desirable for either public or private schools, since the major expenditures of both of those organizations do not scale linearly with the number of students. Between these factors and the smaller cash pool, public schools will be forced to do more with less, while simultaneously being hamstrung by the new accounting requirements.
I'd like to reiterate that I know where you're coming from on this.
I was referring to commodity market in terms of commodity PCs. In any event, both of the points you mention have already been addressed.
I have no idea why that was informative to so many people either, actually, since you're right- it's just my opinion and supporting evidence.
My opposition to the private-schools-for-all proposals is based on the experience of going to a rapidly growing parochial school, and seeing how the much-vaunted small teacher-student and peer-peer relationships suffered under that growth.
It is always dangerous to expand personal experience into broader trends. My experience taught me that while the private schools are well-equipped to handle small numbers of students with significant access to outside resources, they are not ready to become public schools themselves- that their success is not independent of their scale, and that the success of students in a given environment has as much to do with the students themselves as with the building in which they are taught. Your mileage may vary.
To my mind, it seems reasonable that one of three scenarios will transpire if/when school vouchers become the norm.
Firstly, that the vouchers cause a mass exodus from underperforming schools to private schools, exceeding the absorbative capacity of those institutions, while simultaneously destroying the intimacy of the student community and forcing the schools to either lower the rigorous academic standards that brought them to such a perilous position, or fail the new crop of students ill-prepared for such a transition.
The second scenario is that vouchers create a flood of new applicants to private schools, but that the private schools accept only a small portion of those students, effectively preserving the status quo in the limited number of private institutions, but doing little more than creating a brain drain in the public system, while simultaneously reducing its ability to respond effectively by leveraging capital- remember that government allocations occur on the fiscal calendar, while per-student allocations cannot be released until enrollment is finished.
The third scenario is the true status quo scenario: that vouchers are insufficient to overcome the difficulties posed by the lack of private school busing systems, gifted and challenged programs, needs-based lunch discounts, speech therapy, or counseling. That nothing changes except the introduction of another layer of bureaucratic waste and delay in the allocation of government money. In this scenario, the rich, though already possessing the resources to afford an alternative education, are afforded the luxury of having that decision subsidized, while the poor continue to attend the same underperforming schools that have fostered generation after generation of dropouts.
I don't like the idea that the quality of a child's education, that the scope of their horizons, should depend on the thickness of their daddy's wallet. Some people, apparently including yourself, feel differently; some disagree with my assessment of the workability of the voucher plans, and I can respect that even as I disagree with it.
Which is still just tap dancing around the fact that there *is* a cost, and not an insignificant one given the narrow margins of the commodity PC market.
I live in a raid county. Trust me, if human suffering is a solution to this problem, I don't think putting immigrants on the rack would bring this to a close any more quickly. The idea of punishing the heads of corporations is a step in the right direction, but it still doesn't address the fundamental human rights concerns I have about the system. What seems to me to be a fair system is to go ahead and make all the "illegals" citizens and use existing labor practice laws to ensure that everybody A) competes for the same wages and B) pays the same taxes.
As for the "economic collapse", ask any economist: it just isn't there. Popular perception is that it is, but in real numbers there isn't any evidence, and if you want wages in fruit picking to, pardon the pun, pick up, then enforce the minimum wage laws for everybody so that citizens of this country aren't competing against people who have no legal protection from dollar-a-day wages.
My basic premise here is that we have both a humanitarian and an economic interest in ensuring that Americans have a level field to play upon, and that American businesses have a vested interest in getting the workers, both skilled and unskilled, that they need and that we do not provide. We can meet both these needs, and in so doing boost our competitiveness vis a vis the rest of the world.
You're deliberately confounding cultural and economic prerogatives. We live in the age you mention; every effort we have exerted to stop immigration has failed miserably, and yet we face no such economic collapse.
Most enterprise PCs do not come with trialware.
Private schools have limited capacity. You would be helping the students already at those schools, but not doing any favors for the huddled masses, most of whom won't have anywhere to go even if the cash suddenly becomes available.
Private schools also don't generally have the resources to provide low-cost lunches, gifted and challenged programs, or many of the "extras" that come with a public school education. Busing is a popular complaint- few private schools have the resources to bus students in- as are the lack of speech therapy and student counselors. All of these are more commonly used by low-income students than those from wealthier families, ie, those these proposals are meant to help.
It is my experience that the lawmakers that push these laws know all of this, and use it to prevent the private (and especially parochial) schools from opposing such measures. It's enough to make me question whether their enthusiasm has more to do with feeding the golden goose than it does with starving the beast.
Because everything that works on a small scale works on a large scale, right? And I'll bet all those nice Jesuit schools are going to be really, really happy about taking on the huddled masses.
Get real.
I insist that our immigration laws are contrary to the basic concepts of human equality, dignity, and merit because they are the only laws we tolerate that treat people differently based not on who they are, but rather where they come from.
All day long, I hear businesspeople rail against people who work just as hard as they do, who know just as much as they do, and say that the system under which they prosper need not extend to a man akin to them in all respects but the place of their birth.
I hear preachers, forgetful of the cardinal rule of their faith- that there, but for the grace of God, go I- announcing with hateful intent that the obligations of mercy, of kindness, of generosity, do not transcend the obligations of law and their mandate of discrimination.
I will not pretend to understand these sentiments. I do not see what there is to fear from letting a man's merit speak louder than his origins, or why a nation as great as ours should suffer that fear to overcome our mercy and our decency.
I have a feeling that I'm about to hear why any number of supposedly intelligent people believe we should, though, and that scares me.
I went to a private school. Trust me, private schools are not the solution.
Any helpful suggestions? And don't say private schools.
Skipping past the parts of your screed that are just your random opinion, your statement about the Windows tax amazes me, and not in a good way. For somebody who claims to understand how businesses make decisions, it is pretty clear that you don't understand that when you add cost at one point in a supply chain, you increase the final cost of the product. It may be "boring", but you're a fool if you don't see its impact.